3 Answers
3

Root records in DNS are the central DNS servers the world relies on to coordinate resolution. This has nothing to do with your server or DNS records.

I think what you're looking for is a Default Record, so that when people go to http://domain.com it brings up your site. Yes, Default Records have to be of type A (or AAAA for IPv6 addresses) in most DNS servers.

Is it possible to have multiple default records pointing to different IP addresses? Google apps allows you to forward domain.com to www.domain.com and therefore need to point domain.com to a list of IPs they give you.
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Hilt86May 7 '11 at 1:39

@Hilt86, yep, default records are just A records with the same name as the parent domain, and you can have multiple A records with the same name. This is of course dependent on the implementation, which will usually support this, but isn't required to (IIRC).
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Chris S♦May 7 '11 at 2:24

1

Thanks :) I really need to read the DNS & BIND book by O'Reilly
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Hilt86May 8 '11 at 8:19

There is a restriction that CNAMEs, which are the aliases, are only allowed to be by themselves and thus aren't allowed as a top-level domain record (because there is also an SOA record there). So, no you can't have an alias. But functionally a web browser will treat a CNAME and an A name the same way so it wouldn't help you in the end.

Your problem is that you need a web server to be running and acting as domain.com and then redirecting you to www.domain.com. That's actually what I'd suggest and what many sites do: The server that serves up this redirect doesn't need to be nearly as beefy as the www one.

I would agree with Chris S, but disagree with Wes, having just spent several hours unsucessfully trying to persuade Internet Explorer to redirect both the http:// and www prefixed variants of a domain name to a hostedbyamazon.co.uk domain.

Use of a www record and associated CNAME value in the DNS zone file works for when the domain is prefixed with www for both Internet Explorer and Firefox; however, whilst something along the lines of...

...works to make Firefox redirect non-www prefixed requests, absolutely nothing, including redirecting every request, works with Internet Explorer beyond the DNS controlled redirection of www.

As this is not an issue I have ever encountered previously with Internet Explorer, I have a strong suspicion that the issue is with there being no A record in the DNS zone file for the domain in question (necessary to avoid a nasty conflict with the NS records in the same zone file).